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SCIEX and IROA Technologies to Offer Complete Solution for Next Generation Metabolomics

SCIEX has entered a co-marketing agreement with IROA Technologies LLC, a reagents and kits company specializing in metabolomics analyses. This relationship will uniquely position SCIEX to address the major challenges in untargeted metabolomics analyses by enabling metabolite identification and automating the measurement of biochemicals in biological systems.

Under this Agreement, IROA Technologies and SCIEX will promote a unique measurement system called the IROA Workflow with SWATH® Acquisition based on next-generation metabolomics and TripleTOF® Systems. This focus on improving metabolite identification while improving quantitative accuracy will enable scientists to differentiate the real biochemical signatures from the noise allowing higher confidence in their analyses of complex sample types, potentially yielding superior biological insights and discoveries.

IROA® is an isotopic methodology in which all biological molecules are uniformly and randomly labeled to create informative isotopic patterns that are readily discriminated from artifacts. Because of the uniform nature of the labelling, these patterns show up in not only the MS, but also in all fragments in any subsequent MS/MS.

Isotopic Ratio Outlier Analysis IROA is a simple and direct metabolic profiling technique in which specific and unique signatures or (tags) are embedded into biochemical metabolites for relative quantitation by mass spectrometry (MS) and uses software algorithms to find, identify and quantitate these specific signatures.

“The combination of SWATH and IROA improves global metabolomic workflows by enabling reference to a 13C isotopic standard, enhancing the identification of both known and unknown metabolites, and will ultimately improve quantitative performance of hundreds of metabolites in a single injection,” states Dr. Tim Garrett, Associate Professor at University Florida School of Medicine.

SWATH Acquisition, a data independent acquisition (DIA) workflow is well adopted in quantitative discovery proteomics, and is now starting to take off in untargeted metabolomics workflows. SWATH allows a user to collect MS and MSMS of every detectable peak in their sample, thus creating a digital map of the metabolome. Variable Window SWATH (an enhanced way of collecting MSMS, using narrower mass windows in denser regions of the MS spectrum) allows for specificity. The major advantage is that there is a huge enhancement of data quality through data reduction by removal of background/noise and keeping only the biologically relevant peaks, thereby eliminating false discovery.

“Advancing precision medicine by reproducibly quantifying hundreds of metabolites in large sample cohorts is of high importance to both academic and clinical research labs,” said Mark Cafazzo, Director of Strategic Market Management at SCIEX. “The use of IROA with variable window SWATH Acquisition allows researchers to collect comprehensive data from complex mixtures for identification and quantitation in a single injection, and then rapidly reduce the complexity of the results, accelerating the identification of biologically-relevant metabolites. By partnering with IROA Technologies and adding the IROA Workflow Kit to SCIEX next-generation metabolomics solutions, we help scientists address the metabolite identification challenges they face every day, especially when working with complex samples.”